Before Cooper could rectify the situation, she found herself and her staff buried under the Big Six technology projects. And Cooper's senior managers seemed to have free rein to do those big projects with an open chequebook. When asked how his new job was, Ken Goltara, whom Cooper hired in 1997 as corporate manager of business systems, recalls saying at the time: "It's great. People never ask me how much things cost; they only ask me when I'm going to get it delivered. That's the only thing people care about".
On the business side, Toyota Customer Services' Daly says that most projects started out with vague statements about what the new system would do. And then, they were disappointed when the project didn't quite meet their (often unarticulated) expectations. Jim Farley, who was working as the Midwest general manager of Lexus in 1999, recalls the anxiety around the Dealer Daily initiative, an extranet designed to allow Toyota and Lexus dealers to interact with headquarters, factories and other parts of the company, as well as fully integrate with the dealer management systems. The Lexus dealers were anxious because the earlier rollout for the Toyota extranet had not gone well. IS did not sufficiently train the dealers on how to use the new system, so naturally they had problems with it.
"We were all so nervous," Farley recalls. "As much as people [in the dealerships] hated the old system [an AS/400 satellite-based system], they were pretty scared about" the new initiative. As it turned out, Farley says, IS heeded the lessons it learned on the Toyota rollout, and the rollout for Lexus extranet in 2002 went much more smoothly.
The Big Squeeze
Starting in 2001, Japanese executives were feeling squeezed because of a tanking domestic Japanese market and lukewarm results from its global units. Toyota Motor Sales USA, though, had increasing sales and market share. Japan needed to rely more on its American division's profits, and from across the Pacific, the parent company started to look more closely at US spending habits.
All domestic departments soon felt pressure from senior management. IS, in particular, was a black box for the executives. "They hadn't a clue on technology," Goltara says. "They just knew it's this big thing."
Both Japanese and US management wanted to know more about IS's runaway costs, which had doubled after Cooper's arrival and, at its peak, tripled. And Toyota Motor Sales president and CEO Yuki Funo wanted Cooper to tell him where the ceiling of IS's spend was.
Executives were saying: "Is everything in IT this size and this much of a challenge? My God, that's a lot of money", Cooper remembers.
Meanwhile, she could no longer ignore the distant rumblings from across the courtyard that had worked their way down into the rank-and-file business staff. To them, IS had become an unresponsive, bureaucratic machine.
So Cooper started soliciting informal feedback from a wide range of businesspeople. What she discovered was an accumulation of "very painful projects for both IT and the business", she says. "Clearly there was not enough communication and education on our part."
In late 2002, Cooper hired an outside consultancy to interview TMS's top 20 executives. She wanted their honest opinions of how IS was doing. The results didn't provide all the answers to IS's ailments, but she certainly saw the hot spots. "Parts of [the survey results] were stinging," Cooper says. "But you can't be a CIO and not face that."
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